Nearly three years ago, a tall, plump, perspiring Negro preacher named Glenn T. Settle, trailing 19 dusky members of his Gethsemane Baptist Church, marched into Cleveland's station WGAR and asked permission to sing a few spirituals. The Rev. Settle and his flock were only fair. But to Spiritual-Fancier Worth Kramer, young white program director of WGAR, the colored choir presented a chance to try his hand at arranging Negro music. Adding 16 voices to Settle's original 19, he drummed his arrangements into the musically illiterate group by rote, drilled them for weeks before he put them on the air. Their success was immediate and overwhelming. Broadcasting from 8:30 to 9 C. S. T. every Sunday morning, the choir soon had Cleveland by the ears, quickly graduated to a CBS network. Today, under the program name of Wings Over Jordan, the choir is carried by 107 Columbia stations, attracts 5,000 letters a week, is heard via short wave all over the world.
No mercenary motives inspire Wings Over Jordan. A five-minute spot is reserved on every Wings Over Jordan program for a talk by a distinguished U. S. Negro on how the white and colored races can best get along together.
The choir's concert tours have enabled the 35 members of the troupe to throw up jobs as house painters, waiters, butlers and cooks, vacate their berths on WPA. To date the choristers have given 61 concerts at up to $1,500 an appearance, traveling in their own $19,000 bus, from which they once serenaded an astonished chain gang in Georgia. Last week Messrs. Settle & Kramer announced what they were going to do with their net at the end of this season and henceforth. They will provide 20 college scholarships for colored youngsters all over the U. S., to be competed for by examinations in high schools. They also announced that out of the many nibbles they have had they will choose a sponsor to help them out.